On a recent long-haul flight, I became mesmerized by the feature that shows your current position, flight path, altitude and time to destination on a TV screen. It reports air speed, and that it's colder than minus 52 degrees Fahrenheit outside, close to the point where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet.
This particular flight was from Sao Paulo to Miami, more than 10 hours of the sardine experience. The movies were dreadful and barely watchable on the poor-quality screens they put on the back of the seat, and unviewable when the fellow in the seat directly in front slams his seat-back to the maximum reclining angle. That puts the screen too close to watch and at the wrong angle.
About the only thing I could watch without strain was the screen that reports the flight progress.
I'm not sure how this is done, although I suspect it's based on a GPS system that's then fed through some software that positions a toy plane against a map.
What first puzzled me is the list of towns on the screen. The computer showed our progress in reference to Brazilian cities called Londrina, Uberlandia, Franca, Imperatriz, and Blumenau. Brazilians I know never mention these places. And there was nothing on the screen suggesting we were anywhere near Rio de Janeiro.
Other cities made notable included Iquitos and Iquique, the former being the largest city (400,000 people) in the Peruvian rain forest, the latter a smaller Chilean town of about a quarter-million souls. I suppose if I were programming the in-flight progress video, I'd toss them in too, just because it's so much fun to say them together.
Sometimes the view on the screen would show a very large chunk of the map, from Brazil to Florida and from the Pacific shore to West Africa. The only cities worth noting in that area turned out to be Austin (Texas), Freetown (Bahamas), Marrakesh (Morocco) and Dakar (Senegal), as well as Miami.
Who programs these things?
I checked Google to find out, and found no company that would admit to making this pre-millennium technology (I first saw it on a Qantas flight in 1995). Instead, I found companies offering very sophisticated in-flight passenger entertainment, involving streaming TV and movies, games, Web surfing, e-mail and gorgeous tracking screens. Some include Google Maps (JetBlue offers that), broadband connectivity, data and video download speeds of up to 8 megabits per second. Panasonic's iXplor In-Flight Tracking System is a moving map application that not only shows the flight's progress, but allows passengers to “explore the world right from their seats” using high-resolution satellite images.
That's the idea, all right, but what these companies are offering makes everything I've seen so far look as colourful as Pong did in 1972, without zoom levels, telephone, live-text news feeds, meal and drink ordering, touch-screen shopping or interactive games.
Perhaps it's because these systems cost a lot, and airlines are living in a hand-to-mouth business — and the hand is holding a cold and uninviting sandwich.
But such a system, with its flashy technology, certainly would go a long way to making me forget that I am, from an economic point of view, just another a sardine.
